Setting up buy online pickup in store for the holiday rush
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A practical guide to setting up buy online pick up in store before the holidays, covering inventory sync, curbside pickup, refunds, mismatched orders and cutoff times.
Buy online pick up in store works over the holidays when your online order, your shelf and your till all read from the same record.
Shoppers want the gift confirmed before they leave the house and to collect it on their own schedule. Some 86 percent of shoppers in Canada plan to shop close to home for the holidays, putting local retailers in a strong position to offer pickup. What's usually missing is a clear link between the online order and the handoff at the counter.
That link is where pickup programs succeed or stall. The harder work sits in inventory counts, payment timing, pickup verification and refunds, since each one touches both your online store and your till. Set those up before the rush, and BOPIS becomes a calm, repeatable routine.
Buy online pick up in store, often shortened to BOPIS, lets a customer pay for an item on your website and collect it from your shop. Click and collect is the same model under another name. The order starts online and finishes in person, so both halves of your business have to agree on what was sold.
Picture a toy shop in Halifax with one location and a modest online store. A parent orders a building set at 9 p.m., receives a ready notice the next morning and collects it on the way to work. No shipping fee applied, no courier cutoff mattered, and the handoff took under two minutes. Behind that handoff, the website promised an item the shelf had to hold and the till had to recognize a sale it never rang up. You're running one transaction across two systems.
Setting up BOPIS means connecting your online catalogue to live store inventory, choosing when the card gets charged, defining a pickup routine and training staff on it. Start in October or early November so the process has run on quiet days before it meets a busy one.
The ordering half needs an online checkout that your customers trust with their card details. Moneris Online covers that side as the payment gateway behind your site's checkout, so an order reaches the shop paid and ready for pickup. Five pieces need to be in place before you switch pickup on.
The ready notice deserves the most attention. Shops that send it automatically at checkout invite customers to arrive before anyone has checked the shelf. A manual trigger adds a minute per order and gives your team a natural point to catch a damaged box or a wrong size before the customer does.
Curbside pickup is BOPIS with the handoff moved to the parking spot, and it suits shops with easy vehicle access and bulky or heavy goods. It asks more of your team than counter pickup does, because someone has to leave the floor for every order.
A garden centre in Kelowna selling 20-kilogram bags of ice melt has an obvious case for it. A staff member with a cart can load a trunk in a minute. A downtown gift shop with street parking two blocks away has almost no space, so a clearly marked pickup counter near the door serves its customers better.
If you do offer curbside, give customers a way to announce themselves, such as a reply-by-text number on the ready notice or a numbered parking spot. Nobody wants staff searching a dark, icy lot at 5 p.m. for a grey SUV, so ask for the vehicle colour and plate at checkout.
A mismatch happens when the order in the bag differs from the order in the system, and the fix depends on being able to refund or adjust the original online payment from the store. Staff need one written rule for each common case.
Take a customer who ordered two scarves and finds only one was in stock. Your staff member should be able to pull up the online order at the counter, refund the missing scarf to the original card and hand over a receipt showing the adjustment. If the till can't see online orders, the refund becomes a paper note and a promise to sort it out later.
|
Pickup situation |
What your staff should do |
|
An item is out of stock after the order was paid |
Refund that item to the original payment method before the customer arrives and tell them by email or text. |
|
The customer wants a different size or colour at pickup |
Process a return on the original order and a new sale so inventory and receipts both stay accurate. |
|
The order was never collected within the pickup window |
Send one reminder, then refund the order and put the goods back into the shelf count. |
|
Someone other than the buyer arrives to collect |
Release the order only if the buyer named that person at checkout or forwards the confirmation. |
A refund issued as cash or store credit against a card payment leaves the card transaction open to a later dispute, and it throws off your reconciliation. Loose ends like that can come back as chargebacks in January. Post your pickup and return terms on the product page, the confirmation email and the counter.
Stop taking pickup orders when you can no longer pick, bag and confirm them before closing on your last trading day. For most small shops, the cutoff lands in the early afternoon on December 24. Publish the time on your site a week ahead, then switch pickup off at checkout when it arrives.
Last-minute shoppers are the best argument for BOPIS. Shipping cutoffs are around mid-December, and after that, your shop is one of the few places that can still put a confirmed gift in someone's hands the same day. A bookstore that keeps pickup open until 1 p.m. on Christmas Eve can catch orders no courier will fulfil. That advantage only holds if the stock count is right, so for the final days, raise your inventory buffer, shorten the pickup window to 24 hours and limit pickup to items physically in the store.
A pickup program holds up when your online store and your counter read from one record of stock, orders and payments. Shelving, signage and parking spots come second.
It decides to treat an online order as a store sale from the moment it's paid, with the same inventory count, refund path and receipt trail. Moneris Total Commerce bridges the gap between in-store and online, connecting the payments you take at the counter with those you take on your site. Can the person at your till see, adjust and refund an order that began on a phone?
Get that right, and the holiday rush becomes a matter of pace. A shop that handles the awkward cases well in December has earned the easy sales in January.
BOPIS stands for buy online pick up in store. Customers pay for an item on your website and collect it from your shop. The same model is often called click and collect. It suits small retailers in Canada with a physical shop and an online store—your website, shelf and till need to work from the same record.
Connect your online catalogue to live store inventory and choose when to charge the card. Set a pickup routine and train staff in October or early November. Send the ready notice only after an order is picked and bagged. Ask for the order number and photo ID, or the confirmation email, at the counter. For the online checkout, Moneris Online provides integrated online checkout and payment processing.
Curbside pickup suits shops with easy vehicle access and bulky or heavy goods, but it asks more of your team because someone has to leave the floor for every order. If you offer it, give customers a way to announce themselves, such as a reply-by-text number or a numbered parking spot, and ask for the vehicle colour and plate at checkout.
Refund the missing item to the original payment method and tell the customer by email or text before they arrive. Staff should be able to pull up the online order at the counter, because a refund issued as cash or store credit against a card payment leaves the card transaction open to a later dispute and throws off reconciliation.
Stop taking pickup orders when you can no longer pick, bag and confirm them before closing on your last trading day, which for most small shops is the early afternoon of December 24. Publish the cutoff time on your site a week ahead, then switch pickup off at checkout when it arrives.
Keep online and in-store inventory aligned and hold back a small buffer on fast sellers. Send pickup notices only after orders are bagged. Give staff written rules for verification, refunds and mismatched orders. Publish your holiday cutoff time and limit last-minute pickup to items physically in the store.
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